oVirt questions

From: flushy@flushy.net
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I'm cleaning up my email box, and I saw this dangling unread message.

Did you ever figure this out?

On 2020-06-18 15:35, David White wrote:

> I'm looking for a way to manage multiple physical servers from 1
> interface, and be able to deploy new VMs (or delete VMs) as necessary.
> I'm trying to figure out what the difference is between an oVirt Node
> and the oVirt Engine, and how the engine differs from the Manager.

oVirt is a hypervisor control plane - similar to what vCenter would be 
for ESX
hosts.

I have a deployment of oVirt managing 3 servers, with about 80 Gigs of 
RAM
between them.

I'm actually looking at deploying plane ol' libvirt for my next go 
around, and
fronting it with Ansible automation. I rarely interact with the oVirt
management interface as everything I do is from an Ansible job template.

Cockpit is a web-based interface to a Linux server, with a plugin for 
managing
KVM based virtual machines. If installed, you can manage the virtual 
machines
running on the physical server via cockpit, and you can also connect up 
to 20
(I think) other cockpit interfaces to a single interface (via different 
tabs at
the top). So, you can manage multiple servers from a single cockpit 
screen.
There is no "integration" with cockpit and other servers - meaning, they 
are
not intrinsically aware of each other. you just get a nice web interface 
for
them by logging into a single server.

> Additionally, I _think_ that a node is just a physical server.
> So if I install an oVirt Node onto a server with let's say 8GB

oVirt has a management engine, which does require at minimum 4GB. I
containerized it, and run it as a much smaller footprint as a docker 
container.
It's an abomination though. I don't recommend it. As a container, it's 
very
fragile, and upgrades are a pita. Due to that, I haven't updated it in 
about 2
years..

I'm not sure how much overhead the ovirt engine nodes require, but it's 
not
it's own VM. Essentially, the ovirt nodes become "only hypervisors" and 
you
don't run anything on them except the ovirt software, which then creates 
VMs on
them. So that's all they're used for - dedicated hypervisors.

I hope that helps! Apologies for not seeing this earlier!

--b